I see stories about how election is rigged or that there are security vulnerabilities and lots of people don’t believe the outcome. Why don’t they just open source everything so that anyone can look at the code and be sure the votes are tallied correctly?
security through obscurity is a terrible idea - the problem is still there, and a determined attacker will find it anyway
I don’t disagree. The point here being that the choice that was made was to keep the machines off any network to mitigate a bunch of attack vectors, and that’s having consequences on which unusual compromises had to be found. In other words: I can see how the obscurity is probably not the goal, only a consequence of other goals.
In general I agree, but these voting machines are in the quite uncommon position where potential attackers not only don’t have access to the source code, but in general don’t even have access to the program for any significant amount of time, and has no way of knowing if the software has been updated since they last interacted with it. That makes it very hard to even start developing an attack that could maybe work.
I guess my major concern with voting machines is this.